by LS Hawker
After dressing, Nessa used smudgy black kohl liner around her eyes, then found Daltrey’s Halloween face-paint crayons and sponged on some of the white base, mixing some green into it to make her look dope-sick. She also blacked out some of her back teeth and made fake sores on her arms and cheeks. The last part was the hardest—picking and biting at her fingernails until they were broken and gnarly and then digging her hands into the soil around her potted fern and getting the dirt deep under her fingernails.
The reflection in the mirror this time didn’t look anything like her mom, but it wasn’t an improvement. Nessa had transformed from country housewife into punk in under an hour.
The clock in the kitchen said it was eleven P.M., so Nessa left the house and drove to a Conoco station to use the pay phone there.
Her heart pounded as she walked toward the phone. She picked it up, inserted a quarter, and punched in the numbers on those old metal buttons.
“Yup,” said a male voice.
“I need a quay,” she said in a low voice, even though no one was around.
There was a pause. “Who is this?”
“Nessa Donati. John’s wife.”
Another pause.
“Meet me at the McDonald’s on Sixth Street in JC,” he said. “I’m in the blue Toyota.”
The line went dead.
She thought about not going, but she had to find John and put a stop to all of this. If the cops weren’t going to look for him, Nessa would have to do it.
She drove over to the McDonald’s in Junction City and got there at eleven-thirty. The place was pretty lively, plenty of cars to get lost in. She drove past it, parked a block away, and walked the rest of the way. She saw lightning on the horizon and watched it illuminate the darkened street. What would she find when she got to Tyler?
These were familiar feelings. She remembered walking the LA streets in one of the seedier parts of town with Candy, looking to score. The sensation that someone would jump out of an alley and cut her followed her down those nasty, reeking streets. That was where she learned to look tough, look like you belonged in this world and the people who inhabited it would believe you.
She hoped that rule still held seven years later in this little town.
When she got to the McDonald’s, she went and sat on the curb of the parking lot, pulled out her vapor pen, and smoked. She heard music coming out of some of the cars parked there and knew just to wait.
She waited for twenty-five minutes, watching cars go by, trying not to make eye contact with anyone, although she kept an eye out for the Toyota. She was about to give up hope when a blue Toyota pulled into the parking lot and slowed in front of her. The passenger’s side window rolled down and she heard a voice but was unable to see the face it came from.
“You looking for someone?”
Nessa stood and walked purposefully toward the car, not bothering to bend over and peer in. She didn’t want to look like a hooker to anyone who might be watching.
The dealer was not what she expected, although it made sense that Kansas drug dealers wouldn’t resemble South Central dealers. This guy was a kid, maybe twenty-one. She’d be surprised if could grow a beard. If his balls had dropped yet.
“Hi, Tyler,” she said.
“You want a cigarette?” he said to her.
She scratched at her arms and made herself shiver. She coughed. “I was hoping you’d say that.”
He held the pack out to Nessa, and she hesitated only a minute before taking it and accepting a light. She drew the smoke into her lungs, sirens going off in her head at the unfiltered tar and nicotine blasting into her system. She coughed for real this time and for a moment she thought she was going to throw up. Just as she was able to get it under control, Nessa realized that it would have been a good thing to ralph right now—it would’ve sealed the deal and made her look even more like a junkie.
Tyler was driving them out of the lot now, and Nessa despaired of getting back to her car.
“You a cop?” he said. “You have to tell me if you are.”
Nessa almost laughed and she would have if she hadn’t been so scared. She couldn’t believe that people believed this urban myth. Cops didn’t have to identify themselves.
“I told you,” she said, “I’m John’s wife.”
He looked at her sideways.
“I didn’t know he was married.”
She looked out the window and said, “I’m not surprised.”
“Well, I was surprised when you called,” he said. “I haven’t seen John in a couple of weeks.”
“Really?” she said. “How many weeks exactly?”
He stared at her. “I don’t exactly write this stuff in my diary.”
Nessa tried to do the math in her head, tried to think of when John would have planted the heroin in her house. Had it really been sitting there all that time? It didn’t make any sense.
Goose bumps rose on her arms as she considered the possibilities.
Was John not doing crack? Was this some sort of setup?
The feeling that overcame her had a hallucinatory quality. She remembered when she was a child, long before drugs, when all of a sudden, for no reason, she’d have no idea what day it was, what season it was, how old she was. It would be as if she’d pierced the veil between this dimension and whatever lay just outside it. She had that feeling now.
“He must have jumped to one of my competitors,” Tyler said, wistful.
Nessa shook off her déjà-whatever-it-was. Of course John was doing crack. She’d caught him in flagrante delicto. Of course he was.
Because she could not contemplate the alternative.
She focused on Tyler. “I was hoping you could tell me where I could find him.”
“Nope.”
“Can you give me contact information for your competitors?”
He gave her an incredulous look. “Seriously? I’m not Macy’s in Miracle on Thirty-Fourth Street. I don’t send dissatisfied customers to my competitors.” He went on driving and then said, “So are you going to buy shit from me or what?”
“Actually,” she said, “I’m looking for someone who sells this.”
She held up her phone and the image of the glassine bag.
He pulled his hands off the wheel as if she’d just presented him with a fresh dog turd.
“Well, that explains it,” he said, shaking his head. “I don’t do that shit. John’s moved on to the hard stuff.”
“As opposed to crack,” she said. “You can’t be serious. Do you know who sells this brand?”
“I might,” he said. “Let’s go see if he’s home.”
“Great,” she said.
“Sunflower,” he said.
“Yeah.”
He shook his head.
Tyler drove to a little yellow house that seemed to sag and stopped in front of it but didn’t turn off the car.
“There you go,” he said.
“Aren’t you coming in too?”
“Fuck, no. I don’t want anything to do with that shit.”
This was not good. Nessa remembered the old days and the nonchalance with which she had approached apartments and abandoned parks in order to score dope. She hadn’t had a son then. She’d had no reason to be afraid. Now she did. But she had to find John and she had to stop him.
“Could you call the guy to let him know I’m coming and that you, like, vouch for me?”
The guy sighed deeply and pulled out his phone and called. He squinted out the window at the house, which was dimly lit from the inside.
The phone rang several times.
Finally someone picked up. Nessa could hear the person on the other end of the line. His voice was gravelly.
“Yeah, hey,” Tyler said. “I have a friend here who needs something. You thin
k you could help her out?”
There was silence. Nessa figured the guy had nodded off or just wasn’t interested in “helping.”
“All right,” the voice said. “Send her on over.”
“We’re out front. She’s coming in now, so don’t shoot.”
“You’re out front? Get the fuck out of here, man! You don’t idle in front of a man’s house!”
“Sorry. She’s coming now.” He clicked off his phone.
“Thanks, Tyler,” Nessa said, feeling light-headed.
“Listen,” he said. “You need to brace yourself. Don’t stare at him. He hates it when people stare.”
“Who does? What do you mean? Why would I stare?”
“Just do what I say. You’ll see what I mean when you get in there. I have to go.”
She got out of the car and dropped the cigarette to the ground before crushing it out. She made her way quickly up the walk, pulled back the screen door, and knocked lightly.
The front door opened and standing there was a woman in her fifties or sixties with long, thinning, oily hair, the color of peanut brittle. She wore wire-frame glasses and was shaped like a giant bowling ball with stick arms and legs.
Nessa had thought the person on the phone was a man, with that low voice.
“You Tyler’s friend?” she said. Not in the voice Nessa had heard on the phone.
“Yeah,” Nessa said.
“Well, come on in, you’re letting all the cool out.”
Nessa stepped inside and the dark smells of unwashed bodies in the Kansas heat combined with tobacco smoke and rotten food to give the place a very specific ambiance. The bacteria colony in this place could take over the world.
Nessa rubbed her arms.
“You look in bad shape,” the woman said, putting her icy, spidery hands on Nessa’s shoulders and shaking her a little bit. Then she laughed, her voice cracking and hissing thanks to a thirty-year three-pack-a-day habit.
The only light in the living room was a flat-screen TV. A guy sat in a chair staring at it, watching an infomercial, his right knee drawn up under his chin, rocking like a mental patient. He didn’t acknowledge Nessa or even seem to notice she’d entered.
Her guide made a forward motion with her hand, and Nessa followed her into the kitchen.
Two men sat at the table playing cards, an overflowing ashtray in front of them, beer cans and a half-empty bottle of whiskey surrounding it. One of the men sat facing the doorway, the other opposite him. He didn’t look around when she entered.
“You want a beer?” the old lady said.
She thought about making some excuse, saying she was allergic to hops or something like that, but didn’t want to make them suspicious. “Sure.”
The woman pulled a Pabst Blue Ribbon out of the filthy refrigerator and handed it to her. What do you know. PBR, the choice of drug dealers and hipsters everywhere. Otto would be impressed. As much as a hipster can be impressed anyway. She got a kick out of thinking about Otto in a place like this. He’d shit himself.
She popped open the can and took a long swallow. It tasted so good and went down so smooth she couldn’t help but think, It wouldn’t be so bad to go back to this.
The man facing her stuck his cigarette between his teeth and held out his right hand to her. “I’m Allen,” he said in the voice Nessa recognized from Tyler’s phone call. She tentatively reached for his hand and he yanked her forward and spun her toward his card partner. “And this here’s Smearface.”
She stifled a scream as Allen laughed uproariously.
“What, you never saw someone with a shot-off face before?”
“Allen,” the old lady said. “Cut it out.”
The bottom half of Smearface’s face was sheared off, his nose just two slits in his head like Voldemort. He wore mirrored sunglasses and he whistled and wheezed when he breathed.
“Hi,” he said, and Nessa saw that his tongue was about half the size it should be with few teeth. It was like looking at a horrible Halloween mask.
Allen turned her loose, and she staggered to the counter and leaned against it, her arms crossed tight against her stomach. She was afraid she was going to throw up.
“So, yeah,” Allen said to Smearface, “so this security guard at the school, he was born with a fucked up hand, and they had to amputate it up to the elbow, and he wore his sleeve pinned up like this, and so we called him the long arm of the law.”
Smearface laughed, or at least she thought he did—the grunts and snuffling must have meant amusement. “Long arm of the law!” he repeated. He could speak incredibly well, although his missing nose provided a nasal quality to his speech.
Just then, Allen brought his booted feet down on the ground hard and started. “Did you hear that?” He looked at Nessa. “You heard it, right?”
She shook her head.
He jumped to his feet and knocked over his chair, pulling a shotgun off the top of the refrigerator. He went to the window and looked out, the shotgun dangling at his side. Nessa’s heart beat like a rodent’s, fast and shallow.
“Those fuckers come around here again,” Allen said, “that’s it. I’m gonna blow a hole in them.”
He sat back down with the shotgun across his lap.
“Mom, would you look out front?”
The old lady appeared in the doorway with a matching shotgun. “Can’t see anything,” she said.
So it was a family business.
“Look again!”
“Hey,” Nessa said.
All three of them turned their paranoid gazes to her.
“Are you the guys who sell sunflower?”
They looked at each other.
She reached for her phone and they pointed their guns at her.
“Just getting my phone,” she said, digging in her pocket with her right while holding her left aloft. She thought she might faint. With shaking hands, she scrolled to the photo of the glassine bag.
“This?” she said. She held it in front of Allen’s face, then Smearface’s.
“Yeah,” Allen said.
But Smearface said, “Let me see that.”
Nessa froze, couldn’t make herself hand it over.
He snapped his fingers and she gave it to him. He pinched the screen outward, enlarging the image.
“Did you sell to a guy named John?”
They looked at each other.
“John,” Smearface said.
“I know lots of Johns,” the other said.
“Wouldn’t have been one of your regulars. He’s more of a rock man. He’s about five-ten, dark brown hair and blue eyes.”
“Yeah, we had a guy—remember the guy like five days ago, maybe a week? Came in here acting all squirrely?”
“Beard?” Smearface asked her.
Well, he hadn’t had one when she’d thrown him out but he’d have no reason to shave now.
“Can I show you a picture of him?” She held out her hand. Smearface handed her the phone, and she scrolled through the photos until she found one of John and Daltrey, then held it in front of their bloodshot eyes.
“Is that the squirrelly guy?”
Smearface held up a thumb over the lower half of John’s face. “Could be him, I guess.”
Allen nodded, losing interest.
“What did you mean by ‘acting squirrelly’?” she asked.
The guys looked at each other, suspicious, the default setting of most dope dealers.
“You know, squirrely,” Allen said. “You say he was more of a rock man, and I can see that. He was really jumpy, you know. Didn’t look like someone who would be interested in sunflower, unless he’s a Belushi.”
She wasn’t about to explain that he hadn’t been buying it for himself. “So you remember him. And this was about a week ago?�
��
They both nodded enthusiastically.
She put the phone back in her pocket, and finished off her beer. “Well, thanks,” she said, turning to go. Mom blocked the doorway out of the kitchen.
“You’re not going to make a purchase?”
Nessa stammered. “No. I just wanted to find out if John had been here. I’m trying to find him.”
“You drank one of our beers.”
“Yeah,” she said. “Thanks.” Nessa tried to get around Mom, but she stuck out a bony arm and caught Nessa by the elbow.
“That’s not how we do things around here.”
All the blood in Nessa’s body drained to her feet, making her feel like she might just lift off of the ground.
“What do you mean?” her voice came out as a squeak.
“You come in here, don’t make a purchase, we might think you’re an informant or something like that,” Mom said. “Might be wearing a wire.”
She grabbed the front of Nessa’s tank and pulled. Nessa grabbed her wrists, but the old lady was shockingly strong and managed to use both hands to rip Nessa’s tank right in two.
“No wire,” Mom said, turning her toward the men. Nessa tried to cover herself with her arms, but Mom held her fast.
“Might be somewhere else,” Allen said with a gleam in his eye.
“Maybe you ought to look,” Mom said. “Put your wallet on the table. Keys, phone, everything you got. Need to make sure you don’t have pepper spray or some damn thing.”
“Please,” Nessa said. “Don’t.”
“On the table,” Mom repeated.
Nessa emptied her pockets, and Smearface grabbed up the wallet while Allen rose from his chair, licking his lips and fingering his belt buckle.
Oh, shit.
While Mom kept Nessa’s elbows pinned together behind her back, Allen got on his knees in front of Nessa and started to unbuckle her belt. She wanted to knee him in the face, but there were two shotguns in the room, and who knew how many other weapons were within arm’s reach.
